Ab-II
On reflection the Question might merit an ample if somewhat light treatment since our task here is spiritual in the maine.
Protocols like the Roman Consistorial Protocol mentioned above can indeed obtain in fraught times, and generally they are not just designed to frustrate talk and gossip but are rather engineered to help the papacy along, to help it to rise above all the usual chit-chat on Roman street corners in an imperial city, if one might cite a moderne pop album of the successful group The Corrs. But as the new pope himself has speculated on the abdication and retirement, when he took questions on it at the beginning of his pontificate, pointing out that he only intended to stay in the job for a few years, and this just as a mark of respect for the cardinals like Cormac who voted for him as a novel and nimble new world candidate, then it seems we might just touch briefly on the main contours of this Question. Those Protocols are quite firm … as I discovered myself when I ran into them, when for example I would sometimes write a post-card to other officials in the Casa del Clero in red ink - apparently this was a no-no, and one of the officials there said to me - “Surely you must know young man that only one person in this City writes notes and letters in red ink, and it is not a young Brooke from Grantchester.” So anyway, even the new pope has opened up the question of his replacement during one of his aeroplane flights with journalists, so there is nothing to stop us, we can do so too, and we can note that there are a number of positive reasons for choosing a younger man at 40 or 50:
A younger man would be adept at Twitter;
A younger man might be able to weather Metaverse media;
A younger man would have the energy needed to skate around somewhat akin to a Rev George Walker;
A younger man would also deal with the issue of publications;
A younger man might be a sportsman and so find common ground with the younger people on the planet;
A younger man might find more energies for the job.
There are a number of pious customs surrounding the election of new popes, and the more famous ones are known to the readers maybe, but there is one where an ordinary down at heel franciscan friar would walk in front of the coronation procession of a new pope lighting a little cord taper 3 times and pronouncing or singing the immortal words for monarchs and kings and even for the king of kings representative, Sic transit gloria mundi - “behold so the world’s glory changes and passes away.” There is another less well known responsory that addresses the issue above, when doctors and medical assessors are obliged to verify that the new pope elected and ordained is indeed a man rather than a woman - “habet duos.” No imagination there, as the ubiquitous Fr Bailey once put it. This is because of the speculations of the high middle ages and during the renaissance era when many people opined for a Pope Joan, to quote the book by Bernard Shaw, now replaced by a more moderne trendier tale about such an eventuality called Conclave by Robert Harris. Generally these medics come from the SPQR - they like to verify the credentials of a candidate, since they have often themselves considered this option and the larger problem of fraudulent claimants to the papal throne, since a throne of thrones it indeed is. So the medics have to call out this responsory.
Canonistae are not averse to discussing these things, whatever the formalities concerned, outside of their aulae, though in the late medieval era and in the early renaissance era they did discuss this precise schema, and this was because at the time, there was a large separation between the power of orders and the power of jurisdiction, right up to Bellarmine’s treatment in the Opus concerned, indeed almost an opposition between the two powers and one which was clung to by many serious men and women, and many canonistae used to speculate about the validity of a female getting into that office, since it involved acts of jurisdiction before the coronation and consecration, a lot like our own monarchy here in Britain, and thence it was debated by those canonistae, some of them women, like Hildegard. In the meantime, if the cardinals do choose a layperson, they are to be ordained quickly nowadays, or in the decency of a dead language - statim ordinetur, as we read in the elegant introduction to papal elections, De Romano Pontifice Eligendo. Speculation can triumph but there is always the harder realities of office and legal disposition to contend with - habemus papam. Law does solve some theological debates. There are the two Codexes for this, the 1984 Codex and the 1990 Codex.